Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about what we mean by a ‘good service’ and how strange it is that we don’t have a better understanding of this.

The book is now finished (all 190 pages of it!) it will be published by BIS in November

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It has stories about some of the best (and worst) services out there and contains 15 principles that both designers and non-designers can use to design services that actually work.

The book’s been designed by Daly-Lyon there are also two awesome forewords by Mike Monteiro and Marc Stickdorn, alongside contributions from lots of amazing people – including the 3,000 or so people who commented on the original principles (thankyou if that was you!)

Why this book needs to happen

I wrote this book because after almost two decades of ‘Service Design’ as an industry, most of the services we use everyday are still terrible.

They’re terrible for lots of different reasons, but chief among them is that they aren’t designed to meet our most basic needs. In fact, most of them haven’t been designed at all.

The vast majority of our organisations have a kind of ‘service blindness’ – where we don’t even recognise what we provide to as a service in the first place.

Those that do, often rush to create new and innovative experiences whilst overlooking the one crucial thing we need from services: to be able to do what we set out to do with as little friction as possible.

The resulting bad services don’t just add friction to our lives, they can put us in danger (there are lots of examples of this in the book).

Knowing what good looks like for services isn’t just a nice to have, it’s vital if we are going to finally see services as things that need to be designed, and provide them in a way that is safe and sustainable, both for us and the world we live in.

As Marc says in his foreword, “this book is long overdue”.

The resulting 15 principles of good service design in this book are the things that are universal to all services – whether that’s booking a flight or getting medical care.

This is book is not about ‘great services’, ‘unique services’, ‘thrilling’ or ‘magical’ services. It won’t tell you how to ‘wow’ your users with something they didn’t expect, or build something that the world has never seen before.

This book will tell you is how to design a service that your users can find, understand and use without having to ask for help.

It will tell you how to not disappoint your users, and make sure they can do the thing they set out to do. In a nutshell, it will help you to make services that work.